Uncertainties in asteroseismic grid-based estimates of stellar ages

Abstract

We study the impact on stellar age determination by means of grid-based techniques adopting asteroseismic constraints of the uncertainty in the radiative opacity, in the initial helium abundance, in the mixing-length value, in the convective core overshooting, and in the microscopic diffusion efficiency adopted in stellar model computations. We extended our SCEPtER grid (Valle et al. 2014) to include stars with mass in the range [0.8; 1.6] Msun and evolutionary stages from the ZAMS to the central hydrogen depletion. The current typical uncertainty in the observations accounts for 1 sigma statistical relative error in age determination which in mean ranges from about -35% to +42%, depending on the mass. However, due to the strong dependence on the evolutionary phase, the age relative error can be higher than 120% for stars near the ZAMS, while it is typically of the order of 20% or lower in the advanced main-sequence phase. The systematic bias on age determination due to a variation of $\pm$ 1 in the helium-to-metal enrichment ratio Delta Y/Delta Z is about one-forth of the statistical error in the first 30% of the evolution while it is negligible for more evolved stages. The maximum bias due to the presence of the convective core overshooting is of -7% and -13% for mild and strong overshooting scenarios. For all the examined models the impact of a variation of $\pm$ 5 in the radiative opacity was found to be negligible. The most important source of bias are the uncertainty in the mixing-length value alpha_ml and the neglect of microscopic diffusion. Each of these effects accounts for a bias which is nearly equal to the random error uncertainty. Comparison of the results of our technique with other grid techniques on a set of common stars showed a general agreement. However, the adoption of a different grid can account for a variation in the mean estimated age up to 1 Gyr.